Turkish officials question planned papal visit

Pope Francis may visit Turkey on 29-30 November with the aims of strengthening links with the Orthodox Church’s Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholo­mew of Constantinople, and of supporting the cause of peace in the region, writes Jonathan Luxmoore.

Turkey shares borders with Syria and Iraq, who have both lost territory to the terrorist Islamic State. The feast day of St Andrew, who is particularly revered in the Orthodox Church, falls on 30 November. According to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, confirmation of the visit only awaits a formal invitation from the Turkish Government. Any delay, La Repubblica said, was because the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, took up his post only on 28 August. “Erdogan will sign the invitation in the first days of the coming week, and this will be delivered to the Vatican,” the paper said.

However, a senior Turkish religious official has attacked the plans, accusing Pope Francis of failing to defend Muslims from “violence and discrimination” in Western countries. “The Pope must translate words into deeds regarding the misperception and misinterpretation of Islam,” said Mehmet Görmez, the head of Turkey’s presidency for religious affairs, or Diyanet, which supervises religious practices, including the country’s 85,000 mosques.

“All religious institutions must defend against this, including the Vatican. This won’t be done by such things as washing a young girl’s feet or arranging inter-religious football games.”

Speaking at the presidency’s Ankara headquarters, Professor Görmez said attacks on mosques had increased sharply in Germany, which is home to a large Turkish minority, from 36 in 2013 to 70 so far this year. He added that Islam was increasingly presented in Western Europe as a “security problem”, and said he believed the Pope had not done enough to protect its adherents.

Turkey’s 37,000-member Catholic Church, which is denied legal recognition in the mainly Sunni Muslim country of 80 million, has suffered a wave of outrages, including the 2006 murder of Italian-born Catholic priest, Fr Andrea Santoro, at Trabzon, and the 2010 fatal stabbing of Bishop Luigi Padovese.